Comments

Comment by Harmonex

Comment by IDrownFish

The current plan for discipline priests is for them to smite in the downtime when healing isn't needed as much.

From the 7/16/10 Blizzard Developer Twitter Chat:

Q. Some of the new talent trees for healers seem to emphasize a style of "mana regeneration by dealing damage." Is that intentional? If so, why?A. Yes. In almost any situation, there are periods where heals are not urgently needed 100% of the time. Today, you probably just cast heals anyway in case someone takes damage, since mana doesn’t matter much. But if mana did matter, the “right” thing to do would be to do nothing. Talents such as Telluric Currents provide an active way to recharge mana while contributing damage.

From what I can gather, the plan is to build up a stack of Evangelism during the periods of reduced necessity, then keep the stacks up with the occasional Smite. When you need the mana, or need a cooldown to pop, use Archangel to restore mana and increase your healing for an amount of time. Atonement is there to provide some healing while you build up/maintain stacks of Evangelism, so that you're not completely useless to the party or raid while you set things up.Atonement is now there so that Smite can replace the regular Healspam for a discipline priest.

A good healer will be able to juggle the stacking of Evangelism and regular healing, know when to blow their stack to get the most out of it, and know when is the best time to begin building another stack.

Comment by Stormwaker

One big benefit from this will become a hybrid dps/healing spec, more so then previous expansion installments. While the Disc tree's main goal is healing, I'll find myself bored as heck in a dungeon/heroic, simply because the group is really good. The dps know how to avoid getting hit, and the tank barely takes any damage with shield/renew on him/her, so either sit there and twiddle my thumbs or occasionally dot up a few targets to push it along.

This adds another layer to it, if the group is moderately good, then you can deal damage, heal friends and have a battery/amplifier for healing. These changes make healing a lot more interesting.

Comment by Nightabsm

Now automatically available to all Discipline Priests as of patch 5.0.4.

Comment by TheWheatOne

I cried all night when I saw that they took this forever away from holy and shadow priests. :(

How the hell does an angelic state get taken away from Holy, now made for only those in Discipline, while Holy gets Chakra States, and Discipline can never learn it? It still baffles me.

On a totally different gameplay note, now that holy can use Evangelism by default, stacked for getting more damage, why would they take away the option to consume it for better healing with Archangel?

Of all healer classes, what possible reason would they take that away, when it seemed balanced and useful before during downtimes in raids/dungeons, to help with burst healing later in the fight? Now all they can do is do more damage with Evangelism. Think about that for a moment. Holy doing more damage. And has no reason to do so in raids now, without Archangel.

Comment by sylancer

Evangelism can be considered as the resources for DisciplinePriest, one can have 5 stacks of Evangelism max.it generate by (those all: heal 1 friendly target for 90% of the damage; each stacks of Evangelism increases damage and healing by 4% and reduces mana cost by 6%):